Had the Orioles’ first foray into the free agent pitching market yielded a veteran with major league experience, it would be pretty simple to know what to expect in terms of performance based simply on looking at the proverbial back of his baseball card to see what he’s provided in the past.

With Japanese right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano, there’s an incredibly impressive track record of success in Nippon Professional Baseball but a bit of opacity as to how the 35-year-old will transition to the majors, particularly at a stage in his career when he’s getting by on locating a quality pitch mix as opposed to overpowering hitters with velocity.

It doesn’t feel incredibly satisfying to shrug my shoulders and equivocate that it could go well or could go poorly, though the answer is probably more knowable with the pitch modeling capabilities and resources a team like the Orioles undoubtedly has at its disposal.

For the rest of us, here’s what we can glean.

Sugano is going to be in relatively rare company, no matter how he fares. He’ll be the oldest pitcher to make his major league debut since Korean right-handed Chang-Yong Lim took the mound for the Cubs at age 37 in 2013. The last pitcher to debut at age 35 was Yoshinori Tateyama with the Texas Rangers in 2011.

A year before that, Hisanori Takahashi came over from Japan for his age-35 season to represent the most recent starter type to transition at that age. He had a 3.61 ERA with a 1.30 WHIP in 122 innings in 2010 for the Mets.

The most noteworthy examples of pitchers who have signed from Japan in their 30s and found success are Hiroki Kuroda, who debuted at age 33 for the Dodgers in 2008, and Hisashi Iwakuma, who signed with Seattle in 2012 at 31. Neither was particularly overpowering, but both used a broad pitch mix and impeccable location to succeed in the big leagues for years.

Digging into them, there’s a way that the Sugano signing is successful even without premium velocity. Iwakuma averaged 90.3 mph on his fastball in his debut season and 89.3 mph for his career, yet his career hard-hit rate was 29.7%, according to FanGraphs, which would have been the lowest among qualified pitchers in the majors this year. His career swinging strike rate of 9.3%, however, would have been on the lower end, with his called strike and whiff rate, which is a way of measuring a pitcher’s overall skill, of 27.5% around the middle of the pack.

Kuroda was more consistently in the low 90s with his fastball and had a lot more success with his sinker than his four-seamer, and similarly avoided hard contact, with a career hard-contact rate of 25.8%. He demonstrated slightly more bat-missing ability (10% career swinging strike rate) but mostly just got ahead of hitters and induced weak contact.

Without knowing those particular stats from their Japanese careers, it’s hard to know what the “before” picture was for those two past success stories. We do, however, have an idea of where Sugano is on those fronts.

Based on pitch-level data from NPB Pitch Profiler, Sugano had a 9.7% swinging strike rate and a 28.8% CSW. To put that into relatable terms for the Orioles, that’s similar to Zach Eflin’s 9.6% swinging strike rate and Corbin Burnes’ 28.6% CSW.

We also have a couple of recent examples of younger pitchers coming over from NPB to see how those skills have translated from one league to another. It feels important to put a broad caveat on this that these pitchers are vastly different profiles to Sugano, given they have better velocity and stuff, which means they pitch differently.

Dodgers right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitched just 90 innings in his debut season and had a 12% swinging strike rate with a CSW of 30.4% after posting a 13.6% swinging strike rate and 31.2% CSW in 2023 in Japan. In Cubs left-hander Shota Imanaga’s last year in NPB, he had a 13% swinging strike rate and a 29.5% CSW. He actually missed more bats in the big leagues (14.5% swinging strike rate), with a 27.4% CSW, in 2024 after he came stateside.

A year earlier, Kodai Senga debuted with the Mets with a 12.5% swinging strike rate and 28% CSW, after his final NPB season ended with a 13.9% swinging strike rate and a 30.1% CSW. So, in an admittedly small sample that may not even be applicable given the differences in the subjects, it seems there’s typically a drop in CSW. Considering Sugano’s command-and-control profile, this seems like it’s going to be a major part of what makes him successful.

The closest thing to projections that are available are some percentile forecasts using FanGraphs’ ZiPS platform, with the 50th-percentile outcome being a league-average ERA+, a 3.99 ERA, and 1.8 wins above replacement (fWAR). The 90th-percentile outcome of a 3.21 ERA and 3.1 fWAR would feel like a dream, but even the middle-range outcome is worth having.

The Orioles broadly believe in the value of throwing quality strikes in the zone, and hitters are going to have to consider four and five pitches they could see from Sugano at a time, which will make it harder to sit on a particular one, even if, in a vacuum, the fastball might be hittable.

It still feels like a cop-out to say “we’ll see,” but it’s really going to come down to how hitters react to him in the season. Albert Suárez throws harder than Sugano but similarly had his success by locating his fastball and knowing how to pitch, yet in stretches when Suárez wasn’t locating at his best, he was hit hard.

There’s a chance Sugano will be a more extreme version of that. There’s a chance he could be anything, good or bad. There might be better free agent signings made this winter — perhaps even by the Orioles. Few will be more compelling to watch come April.